Rema Hanna is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and a member of the Evidence for Policy Design (EPoD) research program at the Center for International Development, Harvard University. In addition, Hanna is a Research Associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), an affiliate of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), and an affiliate at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL).

Her research focuses on two main themes. First, she has concentrated on understanding how to improve the provision of public services in developing countries, particularly for the very poor. Her work in this area has ranged from testing models of corruption and bureaucratic absenteeism in the field, to understanding how discrimination affects disadvantaged minority groups. Currently, she has been working on a series of field projects to understand what types of individuals are selected to receive social programs under different forms of targeting mechanisms. Second, Hanna aims to understand the implications of environmental policy on poor households in developing countries. Her recent work includes measuring the effects of improved air quality on labor market behavior, as well as assessing the long-run effects of a smokeless cookstove on health and fuel expenditures.

Prior to joining the Kennedy School, Hanna was an assistant professor of public policy and economics at New York University. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from MIT and a B.S. from Cornell University.

To address absenteeism among staff at public healthcare facilities, the government of Karnataka introduced an innovative biometric device to monitor and enforce attendance rules. This column presents findings of a large randomised evaluation of the programme. While some health gains were achieved, imperfect enforcement illustrates the limits of monitoring solutions if there are constraints on full implementation in practice.
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Improved cooking stoves are increasingly seen as an important technology to address indoor air pollution. While laboratory experiments have shown that they could have big effects on smoke exposure and emissions, this column finds limited long-run health and environmental impacts of an improved cooking stove programme in Odisha. This indicates the importance of testing interventions in real-world conditions taking into account willingness to pay, usage, and changes over time.
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India has an impressive number of environmental regulations – but have they been a success? This column presents evidence that while initiatives such as catalytic converters for cars have reduced air pollution, there has been far less success in tackling water pollution. It argues that regulators will only be effective when they are given enough power and legitimacy.
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